Authors: Jan Kyselý Ladislav Gaál Romana Beranová Eva Plavcová
Publish Date: 2010/11/20
Volume: 104, Issue: 3-4, Pages: 529-542
Abstract
The study examines future scenarios of precipitation extremes over Central Europe in an ensemble of 12 regional climate model RCM simulations with the 25km resolution carried out within the European project ENSEMBLES We apply the regionofinfluence method as a pooling scheme when estimating distributions of extremes which consists in incorporating data from a ‘region’ set of gridboxes when fitting an extreme value distribution in any single gridbox The method reduces random variations in the estimates of parameters of the extreme value distribution that result from large spatial variability of heavy precipitation Although spatial patterns differ among the models most RCMs simulate increases in high quantiles of precipitation amounts when averaged over the area for the latetwentyfirst century 2070–2099 climate in both winter and summer The sign as well as the magnitude of the projected change vary only little for individual parts of the distribution of daily precipitation in winter In summer on the other hand the projected changes increase with the quantile of the distribution in all RCMs and they are negative positive for parts of the distribution below above the 98 quantile if averaged over the RCMs The increases in precipitation extremes in summer are projected in spite of a pronounced drying in most RCMs Although a rather general qualitative agreement of the models concerning the projected changes of precipitation extremes is found in both winter and summer the uncertainties in climate change scenarios remain large and would likely further increase considerably if a more complete ensemble of RCM simulations driven by a larger suite of global models and with a range of possible scenarios of the radiative forcing is available
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